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Show HN: ExecAPI – Zero-Infra Background Jobs as a Service

by ammmir on 4/21/23, 5:55 PM with 4 comments

Hey everyone!

I'm excited to show off ExecAPI, a zero-infrastructure background job runner as a service. It's a bit like a hosted Sidekiq (if you're from the Ruby world), except that you can write your job workers in any language that has a Docker image available.

Background jobs (aka workflows) are triggered by either a Cron schedule or an on-demand HTTP request, which then executes one or more actions. Each action is user-submitted code that runs a Docker image of your choosing, and is run in a secure sandbox (currently gVisor, perhaps Firecracker VM in the future).

It's a bit rough around the edges right now, but I'd love to get some feedback on the direction I'm going with this. The plan is to build a low/no-code experience consisting of triggers and actions that can be be used to build automation workflows, a bit like Zapier, IFTT, et al. and to provide an on-prem/private VPC solution.

  • by zeronight on 4/22/23, 1:05 AM

    Congrats on launching - Its so hard to get this far!

    A few points of feedback:

    - Some real world use cases would be helpful to people frame your product. I saw your guide but that isn't a really something useful and could do in my app itself.

    - You should add how this service compares to other function as a service SaaS's on the market. I'm not sure why I would pay $10 a month when AWS lambda can offer the same features.

    - Whats a project? The pricing page mentions it but I don't see it anywhere else

    - Is their a free tier? I see it mentioned on the change log but no where on the site.

  • by bosch_mind on 4/22/23, 3:39 PM

    This is neat. How does it compare to Cloudflare Workers?

    I’ve been thinking about building a tool like this for fun. Does the code run inside a Docker container? I’ve been looking at Firecracker VMs for sandboxing which seems pretty cool